11 minute read
LEIF OVE ANDSNES
PRELUDE 6:30 PM
Lecture by Kristi Brown‐Montesano
LEIF OVE ANDSNES, piano
THURSDAY, JANUARY 19, 2023 · 7:30 PM
THE BAKER-BAUM CONCERT HALL VUSTIN
(1943–2020) Lamento
JANÁˇ CEK
(1854–1928) Sonata: 1.X.1905
Con moto: Presentiment Adagio: Death
VALENTYN SILVESTROV Bagatelle, Opus 1, No. 3
(b.1937)
BEETHOVEN
Moderato cantabile molto espressivo Allegro molto Adagio ma non troppo; Fugue: Allegro, ma non troppo
INTERMISSION
La Jolla Music Society’s 2022–23 season is supported by The Conrad Prebys Foundation, The City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture, Banc of California, The Lodge at Torrey Pines, ProtoStar Foundation, Vail Memorial Fund, ResMed Foundation, Bright Events Rentals, Ace Parking, Brenda Baker and Steve Baum, Raffaella and John Belanich, Gordon Brodfuehrer, Mary Ellen Clark, Teresa and Harry Hixson, Joan and Irwin Jacobs, Dorothea Laub, Jeanette Stevens, Debra Turner, and Bebe and Marvin Zigman.
Mr. Andsnes appears by arrangement with Enticott Music Management in association with IMG Artists.
DVO ˇ RÁK
(1841–1904) Poetic Tone Pictures, Opus 85
Twilight Way Toying In the Old Castle Spring Song Peasants’ Ballad Rêverie Furiant: Folk Dance Goblins’ Dance Serenade Bacchanalia Tittle-Tattle At a Hero’s Grave On the Holy Mount
Leif Ove Andsnes, piano
Artist’s Statement I open my program with Leoš Janáček’s Piano Sonata 1.X.1905, “From the Street.” Paying tribute to a worker killed in a demonstration on October 1, 1905, the sonata is still chillingly relevant today.As I write these lines in late September 2022, young Iranian demonstrators are being killed in the streets of Tehran, and brave Russians are out voicing their resistance to the devastating war that threatens their lives. Janáček’s sonata is full of the anger and sadness we feel as we confront the meaningless war in Ukraine.As an epilogue, I follow it with one of the Bagatelles by Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov. The Bagatelles are dreamy fragments that seem to evoke memories of times past, or perhaps hopes of something better. In 2019 I invited composerAlexander Vustin, then 70 years old, to the Rosendal Chamber Music Festival in Norway. It was only his second time traveling outside Russia and he was clearly affected by having lived for so many years under the oppressive regime there. I found it very touching, not only to get to know him and his music, but also to see him listening with his whole being to festival performances of Shostakovich. Later I was deeply saddened to learn that Vustin passed away during Moscow’s first wave of COVID-19 infections, inApril 2020. Vustin’s Lamento anticipates the “Song of Lamentation” (“Klagender Gesang”) in Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 31, Opus 110.Amost profound operatic aria, the song represents the heart of this compact sonata, in which Beethoven juxtaposes the “high art” of the last movement’s spiritual arias and fugues with the “low art” of the scherzo’s child-like folk songs. The theme of “high and low” also runs through the 13 programmatic pieces of Dvořák’s Poetic Tone Pictures, Opus 85. Poetic short stories like “Twilight Way” and “At the Old Castle” rub shoulders with the triviality of “Joking” and “Tittle-Tattle.” There is intimacy in “Reverie,” drama in “AtAHero’s Grave,” wild virtuosity in “Bacchanal,” and a “Serenade” that develops into the most touching of love songs. The pandemic gave me the chance to study this strangely neglected cycle at last. It has been a most wonderful discovery, for this is life-affirming music of the greatest invention and imagination.
– Leif Ove Andsnes, October 2022
Lamento ALEXANDER VUSTIN
Born April 24, 1943, Moscow Died April 19, 2020, Moscow Composed: 1974 Approximate Duration: 3 minutes
The music ofAlexander Vustin, who died of COVID-19 during the first months of the pandemic, is not widely known in the United States, though it is more familiar in Europe, where it has been performed by such artists as Gidon Kremer, Vladimir Jurowski, the BBC Symphony, and others. Vustin trained at the Moscow Conservatory and worked as a music editor while trying to establish himself as a composer. In 1972, at the age of 29, he disavowed all the music he had written earlier and set off on a much more adventurous and experimental path, including adapting some aspects of twelvetone music in his own compositions. Vustin’s major work is his opera The Devil in Love, on which he worked from 1975 until 1989; he also served as composer-in-residence with the State Orchestra of Russia in 2016.
Lamento, composed in 1974, grew out of an extraordinary and unexpected emotional experience: Vustin went to the funeral of a friend, and as the funeral went on, a bird began to sing outside the window. Vustin was struck by his sense of death inside that room while life proceeded outside. The brief (three-minute) Lamento contrasts that world of inside and outside. The music begins mournfully with the sound of the funeral, but after a few measures the bird breaks in with its own song, unaware and unaffected by the human events within. Lamento sets those two different kinds of music in stark counterpoint, grieving and celebrating at the same time.
Sonata: 1.X.1905 LEOŠ JANÁČEK
Born July 3, 1854, Hukvaldy, Moravia Died August 12, 1928, Moravska Ostrava, Czechoslovakia Composed: 1905 Approximate Duration: 13 minutes
Throughout his long life Leoš Janáček remained a passionate Czech nationalist, committed to freeing the Czechs from German domination. On October 1, 1905, came an event that fired these passions even more deeply. When the Czechs in Brno asked for the creation of a Czech university, the Germans demonstrated against them, and the Czechs retaliated with a counter-demonstration. Troops were called in to quash the violence, and in the process a 20-year-old Czech worker was bayoneted to death. Outraged, Janáček composed a three-movement piano sonata that he titled after the date of that violence; its subtitle has been translated variously “From the Streets” or “Street Scene.”
The sonata was originally in three movements, but at a rehearsal, Janáček—apparently overcome by the quality of works on the program by other composers—stormed onto the stage and, in front of the astonished pianist, burned the last movement.After the next rehearsal, Janáček took the manuscripts to the first two movements and threw them into the Vltava River. He noted: “They did not want to sink. The paper bulged and floated on the water like so many white swans.” This time, though, the pianist was ready—she had made copies of these two movements and saved them. Nearly twenty years later, in 1924, Janáček agreed to their publication. The two surviving movements are quite short, and both are unified around the same rhythmic and thematic figures. The opening Con moto (subtitled “Presentiment”) commences with a generalized theme-shape that becomes, in the fourth measure, the germinal cell for the entire sonata. All the other themes evolve in some way from this figure. It becomes, for example, the accompaniment to the chordal second theme, and throughout the sonata it is transformed by Janáček’s fluid rhythmic sense—the music speeds ahead, holds back, and seems to be stretched or compressed as we listen. The main theme of the Adagio (subtitled “Death” but originally subtitled “Elegie”) also grows out of the first movement’s central theme. Full of a wild and wistful quality, this movement grows more animated and then subsides to an elegiac close. One wonders what the last movement was like.
Bagatelle, Opus 1, No. 3 VALENTYN SILVESTROV
Born September 30, 1937, Kyiv Composed: 2005 Approximate Duration: 4 minutes
Ukrainian composer Valentyn Silvestrov studied piano and composition at the Kyiv Conservatory and has made his career as an independent composer since then. His style has evolved over the decades, from large-scale works to more intimate compositions, elusive in expression and virtually ephemeral in their effect. Now 85 years old, Silvestrov fled Kyiv with the Russian invasion of February 2022 and now lives in Berlin. Of his Bagatelles for solo piano, Silvestrov has written: “In 2000 I started to compose small pieces in the style of bagatelles. Bagatelles are little jewels, because they are not encumbered with any kind of ideological baggage and the creative act always occurs in a flash…As soon as you play the piece at the piano, it is finished, even if it has not yet been written down.As soon as the music exists in notated form you already begin to move away from it—the text begins to take on a life of its own…” The third bagatelle of Silvestrov’s Opus 1 is marked Moderato, and it stays at that carefully paced tempo throughout. It is built around one theme, gentle and inward in its expression, that returns throughout, evolving as it goes and harmonized in new ways on each reappearance. This is not music that goes anywhere or sets out to achieve something. Rather, it evokes a series of changing moods and then vanishes just as quietly and enigmatically as it began.
Born December 16, 1770, Bonn, Germany Died March 26, 1827, Vienna Composed: 1821 Approximate Duration: 20 minutes
The years 1813 through 1820 were exceptionally difficult for Beethoven, who virtually stopped composing in these years. There were several reasons for this: his deafness was now nearly complete, he suffered periods of poor health, and much of his energy was consumed with his struggle for legal custody of his nephew Karl.And—perhaps most important—he had reached a creative impasse brought on by the exhaustion of his Heroic Style. Where the previous two decades had seen a great outpouring of music, now his creative powers flickered and were nearly extinguished. Not until 1820 was he able to put his troubles, both personal and creative, behind him and marshal his energy as a composer. At the end of May 1820 he committed himself to writing three piano sonatas for the Berlin publisherAdolph Martin Schlesinger; these would be Beethoven’s final sonatas. Although he claimed he wrote them “in one breath,” their composition actually was spread out over a longer period than he expected when he agreed to write them. The Sonata inA-flat Major, completed in December 1821, shows some of the most original touches in a group of sonatas that are all distinguished for their originality. The first movement, Moderato cantabile molto espressivo, is remarkable for its lovely and continuous lyricism. Beethoven notes that the opening is to be played con amabilità, and that spirit hovers over the entire movement. The essentially lyric quality of this movement is underlined by the fact that the second theme grows immediately out of the first: the opening idea has barely been stated when the second seems to rise directly out of it. By contrast, the bluff Allegro molto is rough and ready: it is a scherzo with a brief trio section full of energy and rhythmic surprises. The long final movement is of complex structure: it performs the function of both adagio and finale, yet even these elements are intermixed with great originality. The main theme of the Adagio, marked Arioso dolente, arches painfully over a steady chordal accompaniment before
Beethoven introduces a fugue marked Allegro, ma non troppo.After a brief working-out, the fugue comes to a halt and the Arioso theme returns. This time, however, Beethoven has marked it Ermattet, klagend (exhausted, grieving), and here the music seems almost choked and struggling to move. Yet gradually the music gathers strength and the fugue returns, but this time Beethoven has inverted the theme and builds the fugue on this inversion. The sonata ends with a great rush upward across five octaves to the triumphant final chord.
Poetic Tone Pictures, Opus 85 ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK
Born September 8, 1841, Muhlhausen, Bohemia Died May 1, 1904, Prague Composed: 1889 Approximate Duration: 58 minutes
Though he was a fine violist, Dvořák was at best a competent pianist who was able to participate in public performances of his own chamber works. Music for the piano does not figure largely in his catalog, and his works for piano are not often heard today. Dvořák composed his Poetic Tone Pictures at his summer estate at Vysoka between April 16 and June 6, 1889, just before beginning his Eighth Symphony. The title Poetic Tone Pictures comes from the German translation of the Czech title, which might more accurately translate into English as Poetic Moods: Each of these thirteen brief pieces sets out to create a particular atmosphere or paint a quick portrait. In a letter to his publisher, Dvořák described this music: “Each piece will bear a title and is intended to express something, i.e. it is to a certain extent program music, but in Schumann’s sense of the term; and yet I must remark forthwith that they do not sound Schumannesque.” Dvořák had originally intended that there be only twelve pieces in this collection, but finally added one more, a fact that bothered the superstitious composer a little: “It is an ominous number, but there were just as many Moravian duets and they, after all, managed to wander quite a way through the world! Perhaps they will do so again.” These are character pieces. By turn, Dvořák offers the sound of peasant dances and songs, folk tales, pictures of places, or music that can be dreamy one moment and full of wild pleasure the next. Such a description might make the Poetic Tone Pictures sound like salon music intended for domestic consumption, but in fact some of these pieces are quite difficult. Dvořák conceived of Poetic Tone Pictures as a unified set and wanted the cycle performed complete, and at this concert Mr.Andsnes offers a performance of the complete work.
